What did you say?

Ever feel like you are talking to yourself when you ask your child to do something? Can they actually hear you? Probably. Do they need their hearing checked? Most likely not! Would you like them to listen the first time you ask them to do something? YES! who wouldn't want this? I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I have read a few articles and blogs. The two that stood out the most to me are this one and this one. The first article simply states if you don't want to repeat yourself then don't repeat yourself. Hmmm, could it be that simple? It does make sense. After feeling a little guilty for being the cause of this annoying behavior, I decided to try to change my ways (my husband's too). We noticed big changes in our children. As you can imagine, it has been difficult for us to break ourselves of this habit. After all we had been doing this for a long time. We are still working on it. It is also a lot of work managing the punishment. In our case, we do time outs. Expect a whole lot of time outs the first couple of days, but the work does pay off. They get the point that you mean business and there will be no more repeating without a consequence. What have you tried to do to get your children to listen?